Change #1130979 had a related patch set uploaded (by Awight; author: Awight):

[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] [WIP] Exploring why wrong main content is used

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1130979

Change #1131261 had a related patch set uploaded (by WMDE-Fisch; author: WMDE-Fisch):

[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] Fix id of the main body element

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1131261

I'll move this back for now but here some things I found:

• refs will only be processed in the conversion to Wikitext when they have been touched. So when you edit the main in VE but not the sub then the later will not be processed by Parsoid it seems.
• In RefTagHandler::domToWikitext() the doc you get from $extApi->getTopLevelDoc() does not include the whole doc in the body. But you will find all the data you need in the DataBag that can be retrieved with DOMDataUtils::getBag(doc)

The following document can be safely edited in VE, both the subref and main ref:

<ref name="book">The book</ref>
<ref details="p. 123" name="book" />

It's possible that this task was actually caused by issues with T387847: Parsoid handles subref coming before its main ref, I'm merging as a duplicate.

In T389929#10704300, @awight wrote:

The following document can be safely edited in VE, both the subref and main ref:

<ref name="book">The book</ref>
<ref details="p. 123" name="book" />

It's possible that this task was actually caused by issues with T387847: Parsoid handles subref coming before its main ref, I'm merging as a duplicate.

It's not working for wikitext like

<ref name="main-ref" details="p. 123">Old main text</ref>

There I get

<ref name="main-ref" details="p. 123">Old main text</ref>
<references>
<ref name="main-ref">New main text</ref></references>

After saving.

Change #1131261 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] Fix id of the main body element

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1131261